My Secret Lover Is His Brother novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: The Church Basement
They filled the church basement by seven that night, forty folding chairs and then standing room along the walls.
It smelled of floor wax, burnt coffee and wet wool.
I stood at the front by the coffee urn, because nobody had told me where else to stand.
Tiernan held the door at the back, and Rainer sat in the last row with the green cash book on his knees.
He had asked to be there, and the families had let him in, but nobody sat within two chairs of him.
"We're not here to cry," said the man in the yellow slicker.
He stood with his cap in his hands.
"We're here to say it out loud, because he made sure we only ever said it alone."
"I'll go first."
"Twenty-nineteen, Settlement Night, six hundred and forty thousand on the dais, and he read my wife's name in with mine because the boat was in both."
"She was in the second row, and she didn't eat her dinner."
"She died in the spring, and I never did get to tell her it was wrong."
The room stirred, and a woman near the wall said, "Me next."
She was small and grey and held a pocketbook in both fists.
"My husband's boat, twenty-sixteen."
"He read the figure and said, Mrs., you may sit."
"Like I was a dog."
"The boat's gone."
"The husband's gone."
"The figure's still on the paper, and I have been paying it for six years out of my pension."
A third voice came from the back of the room, loud and cheerful and shaking.
"Joslyn Fry," said Joslyn, climbing on a chair.
"My mother ran a drag boat out of here for twenty-two years, and the Trust took it at Christmas, and she waited tables at the Lamplighter until she died."
"I was eleven."
"I stood in this room for her funeral lunch and ate a ham sandwich, and the man who bought the boat for a dollar shook my hand."
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